Big in so many ways (Brooklyn and Upper and Lower Manhattan)

Not only can you buy Mexican kosher ice-cream in Reseda, or donuts and Chinese food in Oakland (we saw such a place), you can buy empanadas at the laundromat in Brooklyn.

Of course, you used to be able eat at a Swiss-Indian restaurant in Alice Springs. Is it still there?

Today was another of those days when you stumble over the unexpected revelation. After going up to Columbia where Kate met the team she'll be doing research with, we decided to go up to the top of Manhattan. This is the place that room advertisements on 'airbnb' say tourists don't know about. In fact, many tourist maps of Manhattan stop short of here. But this is where I fully got a sense of how big Manhattan really is. Pounding up the streets, I could see how Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries could have had country homes up here, on the same island.

We decided to walk in off Broadway and there found a park which marked the highest natural spot on the island.

Not only that, but the paving told us that this was where the colonists tried to fend off a British attack in October 1776. You look back to your right (south), and imagine the defeated colonists fleeing up the island, having rowed across from the Brooklyn side. Here they will try to hold their ground, but retreat across to the Bronx and back around the top of the British. You get a sense of the brilliant cut-and-run campaign Washington waged.

...And a sense of the 18th century. Up at Inwood Park at the very tip, we enjoyed the original topography and flora remaining on the island.

Didn't see any middens (as we would call them) of the Wiechquaesgeck Indians, but emerging from this onto shabby Broadway was quite a shock.

Back in Williamsburg we took shelter from a sudden storm in a cafe. The proprietor asked us if we were 'out-of-towners'. Kate told her how we'd been over to Columbia, to the Department of Psychiatry. Within five exchanges she asked if Kate was a psychologist., I was astonished - "How?" But Kate said it might have been her use of the word 'engagement'. This cafe owner turned out to have been an academic counsellor at Long Island University. I asked her where she had come from. Turkey. Is there a nationality (or flavour) not represented in New York?